About Us

Carleton College DGAH110

Sources: The main sources we used for this project were the handwritten letters of Mary Reynolds, housed in the Carleton College Archives. With the help of David Bliss, we transcribed these primary sources and scanned them in order to work with them in a digital format. For the ArcGIS Storymap, we found images that represented each place circa 1900 from Wikimedia Commons, which is an open-access source for images. Additionally, we were able to use Ancestry and Find a Grave to locate some supplementary information about Mary’s family and her life after her experience tutoring in China. 

Processes: This project was inspired by the lack of accessible transcriptions or digital materials related to Mary Reynolds’ letters. Our first step in our multi-phase process was to take the analog letters and scan them into digital copies. The next step was to manually transcribe the letters. Our approach to letter transcription was to keep all grammar and punctuation as loyal to their original appearance as possible. With that said, all of our transcriptions are our interpretations, which means human error is possible. The final step in our digitization was to assemble the scans onto individual letter pages, with the letter scan on the left side and the transcription on the right side. We used ArcGIS to develop our Storymap, cultivated from pinpointed locations mentioned in Reynolds’ letters. Additionally, we utilized Voyant to produce a textual analysis regarding major themes and trends in Reynolds’s writing. Our final step was to embed our storymap and textual analysis onto specific pages on the website. The website was created on WordPress with a design that effortlessly synthesizes our content for users to engage with. Other pages were then added to make the website feel more alive, one of which is the page you are on now!

Presentation: Our project uses multiple presentation formats to make Mary Reynolds’ letters accessible and engaging for diverse audiences. The primary presentation platform is a WordPress website, which is the center for all of our project components. We chose WordPress for its flexibility when embedding digital tools and the intuitive structure that allows viewers to explore the material at their own pace. The website opens with the 1904 New York Times article about Reynolds. We believe that it creates a historical entry point for the viewers when first looking at her journey. As users scroll, they transition into the main site with a white background with a top bar containing sections for “Text Analysis”,  “Spatial Analysis”, “Disclaimer”, and a short “About Us” page. For the letters themselves, each letter is displayed in a grid format on the main letters page, allowing users to browse the collection visually. When clicked, individual letters expand to show a dual-view format: the original scanned letter image on the left and its corresponding transcription on the right. This side-by-side presentation preserves the historical documents while ensuring readability for our audience. The ArcGIS StoryMap is embedded as an interactive spatial analysis component, presenting Reynolds’ journey as a linear narrative with geographic context. Each location includes descriptions featuring dates and historical photographs from the era, and contextual information about what Reynolds experienced there. The Voyant textual analysis is presented as a separate embedded component, offering visual representations of word frequencies, trends, and patterns across Reynolds’ correspondence. Together, we hope these presentation choices create a multimedia digital experience that honors Reynolds’ journey while making her letter accessible, analyzable, and engaging for contemporary audiences.

The Team

Source Material

Ashton, Susanna. “Compound Walls: Eva Jane Price’s Letters from a Chinese Mission, 1890-1900.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 3 (1996): 80–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/3346878. 

Bays, Daniel H. “The “Golden Age” of Missions and the “Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment,” 1902–1927.” In A New History of Christianity in China, 116-148. First Edition. Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 

Bays, Daniel H. eds. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Chin, Carol. “Beneficient Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (2003): 327-352. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24914416. 

Esherick, Joseph. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. University of California Press, 1987.

Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920. University of Michigan Press, 1985.

Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in turn-of-the century China. Yale University Press, 1984. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dszxzd.

Kwok, Pui-lan. Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1992.

—, —. “Chinese Women and Protestant Christianity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Edited by Daniel H. Bays. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. 

Miller, John. “Admiring the New and Old Japan.” In American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama, 28-38. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015.